"you might get away with it" [2/2], The Hunger Games, Cinna/Portia
“So I hear you got the crazy murdery ones,” Finnick says cheerfully, topping up Haymitch’s glass.
Johanna grins with all of her teeth. Cinna can’t even imagine what it would be like, having her as a mentor; but then he’s currently watching Haymitch’s best attempts at keeping Katniss and Peeta alive, and really, none of the mentors are anything other than completely insane. They won their Games for a reason.
Haymitch puts his head in his hands. “At least the other ones were scared and docile,” he mutters. “They didn’t go around shooting shit at Seneca Crane.”
“I think it’s awesome,” Johanna shrugs, resting her chin on her hands. “I’d be okay with throwing something at Crane.” She tips her head at Finnick. “Hey, didn’t you once-”
“Finish that sentence,” Finnick says, something sharp underlying his tone. “Really. Finish it.”
Johanna rolls her eyes at the unspecified threat, but she stays quiet.
“Fucking eleven,” she says instead, turning to Haymitch. “What do they do to you guys out in Bumfuck, anyway?”
Haymitch rolls his eyes, downs his glass. “You’re just bitter because your kids pulled sixes.”
Johanna’s mouth tightens, and she looks away.
“How are you holding up?” Finnick asks Cinna. “Your first Games and all.”
It’s worse than he expected, and better, and he can’t believe that Katniss might be dead in a matter of days. He refuses to believe that, and... well, that might become difficult in the near future.
He shrugs in response. There’s no way to phrase it, after all.
They have a special place on the balcony, and it’s different to last year, when they were at the back of the stands, the tributes no larger than glittering ants in their chariots. Now, they’re there for everyone to judge, the cameras panning in on their faces, the new stylists.
Even expecting it, Cinna’s breath catches in his chest when he sees Katniss and Peeta, both of them burning bright and perfect, hands entwined and grins on both of their faces that look almost real.
Portia sighs and sways into him, and he wraps an arm around her waist, smiling into her hair.
This is their moment, what they’ve been waiting years for, and despite everything, despite it all, he’s proud of them.
They’ve watched the reaping over and over again; Katniss Everdeen screaming out for her sister, hastily volunteering while the sobbing little girl is carried away into the crowd. Peeta Mellark looking sick as he walks up to the stage, fingers curled into his palms so that no one will see him cry. Villagers watching them with thin, desperate faces, in tattered best clothes, peacekeepers fingering their weapons.
“Are you nervous?” Portia asks, as they test the synthetic flames one more time. Cinna’s left arm is still healing from last week, when they hadn’t quite gotten the formula right yet, but it’s definitely perfect now, crackling over the outfits they’ve mocked together from the measurements sent to them. “To meet them, I mean.”
Cinna is nervous, but excited too. Something about the set of Katniss’ jaw, her pale determination and refusal to put on a show for anybody... he likes her already, and he hopes that she’ll at least tolerate him. He lives in the Capitol and Eight was reasonably wealthy before he left it - he never had to sign up for tesserae, and food was decent and enough, if not plentiful - and he doesn’t know how the girl from Twelve, where they all seem to be quietly starving to death, will react to him.
For a sharp moment, he thinks about what he would have done in Katniss’ situation, but it doesn’t matter anymore, after all, and he pushes the thoughts away.
“Are you?” he asks, turning the question around as they douse the flames of the clothes, reach for the headdresses to make sure that they’ll work too.
“A little,” Portia admits, smile curled at the edges. “I’ll be fine once we’ve met them, but this wait... how do you treat someone who’s had everything taken from them and been given a few weeks to live?”
“Not like a victim, I suppose,” Cinna replies.
A moment later, and the headdresses burst into perfect flames, filling their workshop with light.
Seneca Crane oversees the appointment of the stylists personally, eyes unnaturally blue, mouth tight.
“This is your first year,” he tells Cinna and Portia, expression clearly telling them that mistakes will be met with a firing squad, suspicious of their comparatively simple clothes while the other stylists glitter and shimmer, too bright to look directly at. “So we wanted to assign you to-”
“We’d like to request District Twelve, actually,” Cinna cuts in, because he’s thought long and hard about this. He feels Portia tense a little beside him, but her face doesn’t give anything away.
There’s laughter in the room, and Crane’s mouth twists a little. “Very well, then,” he says. “We were going to offer you something more prestigious, for the record, but take Twelve.”
Later, Portia looks up from her sketchbook to say: “you wanted to dress them up as miners?”
Cinna smiles. “Something like that,” he responds, and reaches for a box of matches.
Portia’s latest boyfriend has left her after complaining that she spends too much time working, which frankly means that he’s angry about how much time Portia spends with Cinna. She hasn’t explicitly said this, but Cinna can read it in her eyes anyway.
He doesn’t apologise, because Portia is all he really has anymore.
She’s lying on his couch, hair tumbling over the pillows, and he brushes a hand against her wrist on the way to the kitchen. “Tea?”
“Thank you,” she sighs. “I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot, Portia,” he replies, and that’s when the letter arrives. Letters are safer, easier not to hack, and there’s something enjoyably old-fashioned about them. Cinna picks up the thick cream envelope, and hears Portia gasp behind him, bouncing off the couch, misery forgotten.
“Is that...” she begins tentatively, and Cinna carefully tears open the letter, unfolding the paper inside.
You have been selected as stylists for the seventy-fourth Hunger Games.
He has to read the sentence several times to force it to make sense.
Portia walks over, plucks the letter from his hands, and gasps.
They shouldn’t celebrate this, not really, not when they think about what it really means - dressing children up for slaughter - but it’s an in, a step, and something they’ve been quietly working towards for years without ever discussing it.
She throws herself into his arms, delighted and shaking at once, and he grins against her cheek, letting himself have this, just for one moment.
His manager thinks that he needs to sell himself better, pursing green-painted lips that match her curling green wig, ringlets that don’t suit her spilling over her shoulders.
“If you don’t want to wear the clothes you design, then why would anyone else want to?” Calliope demands of him, hands on hips.
Cinna wants to fix about two-thirds of her outfit for her, but that’s the quickest route to getting fired and it isn’t as though he isn’t heading there already.
“You do reasonable work,” she adds, waving a hand at the section of the store allotted to him, the mannequins draped in feathers - this season, he likes birds - and glitter, “but you need to work on your profile. You dress like you’re going to a poor district funeral.”
Even now, that makes him grit his teeth, bitter. He says nothing aloud, of course.
Purely to annoy Calliope, he puts in a few phonecalls until he finds out that Finnick is in the Capitol; having a victor request you to style them should be prestigious enough, after all, and the look on her face when Finnick strolls in is enough to make Cinna bite down a smile.
He’s a better person than this, but the Capitol makes you pay all kinds of games, and at least this one won’t end in anyone getting hurt.
“What’ve you got for me, then?” Finnick asks, draped naked in a fitting room, glass of champagne dripping from his fingers. “You could probably just glue feathers to my cock, I hear that kind of thing pleases clients.”
His voice is too sour for Cinna to smile back; instead he just shakes his head slightly and reaches for a rail of shirts.
“We’re rivals,” Portia reminds him on an eyeroll, but she reaches for the sheets of his designs anyway.
Cinna is sitting cross-legged on her bed, portfolio in his lap; Portia’s is lying on the covers beside him ready for his approval in a moment. Working separately is harder than he anticipated; years at the Academy have made him co-dependant, turning his head to ask Portia’s opinion with his mouth full of pins only to find that she isn’t there, of course she isn’t there.
He has co-workers, of course, but they see themselves more as rivals, especially now the Gamemakers are looking for new stylists for the Games, accepting applications and dropping into studios and stores to examine work.
Of course, Cinna won’t beg for anyone’s approval, won’t lay himself out like that.
“By the way,” Portia says after a moment, sweeping a pencil line along the hem of a gown, “I submitted our names to the Hunger Games as potential stylists.”
Cinna chokes and stares at her.
“You wouldn’t say that you wanted this,” Portia tells him, “because you never say what you want. But you’re in the running now.”
She smiles at him without a hint of remorse, and Cinna can’t untangle the complicated mixture of emotions inside him, the want for recognition, the desire to make a difference, and his sheer disgust at the Games themselves, the idea of dressing children up to die.
Portia dips her head back over Cinna’s sketches. “You’re welcome,” she murmurs, in response to the things he can never say.
“To employment,” Portia says in the crowded bar, clinking a glass against Cinna’s. She has emeralds woven through her hair, her lips studded with tiny green stones.
“Employment,” he echoes, and drinks deeply.
Without the safety-blanket of the Academy the world feels different; better, worse, colder, sharp with possibility. Right now, of course, they’re on the bottom rung of everything, but they won’t always be.
Cinna’s designs have gotten him a place in a store, the possibility of selling dresses and suits to bored citizens exploring the narrower, less popular streets of the shopping district. Portia is apprenticed to Malvolio Kingsblade, the second most prestigious designer in Panem; he’s dressed tributes and victors for forty years now. He designs are pedestrian and often verging on the ridiculous, but if Portia doesn’t point this out, well, she’ll do very well.
Johanna is on the dancefloor, golden chains wrapped around her wrists, a trapped look in her black-painted eyes. They look like bruises in her face, and Cinna looks away from her and the dignitary who has bought her for the night. She’s waiting on the revolution to become more than hypothetical, and the alcohol turns bitter in his mouth.
Portia nudges him under the table with one foot wrapped in a pointed peridot-coloured silk sandal. “Not tonight,” she orders. “Tonight is ours. Tonight we’re not revolutionaries.”
Her words lost under the too-loud, too repetitive music. Well, they’re always revolutionaries, but he doesn’t need to tell Portia that, and he knows what she means.
“Ours,” he echoes, covering her hand with his on the table.
The last time Cinna kisses Portia is the night they graduate. They didn’t much fancy staying with their classmates to celebrate, so Finnick got them invitations to a party and made them promise they’d dress up.
Portia is in frothing blue and white that shivers like waves on a beach, while Cinna dresses all in gold to match his eyeliner and rims his eyes with black instead.
Finnick is some kind of guest of honour, which possibly means he’ll be sleeping with half the people at this party, but the food is good and the drinks are plentiful and Portia’s shoes shimmer under the light of the chandelier as Cinna guides her around the dancefloor, graduation and panic and pride bright in her eyes.
No one in the room knows who they are, delightfully anonymous, though everyone’s eyes are on their clothes.
“We should find some excuse to loudly drop our own names,” Portia muses on a lilting smile.
“I feel cheap,” Cinna responds, because he doesn’t design his clothes for this. He’s designing them for a purpose, even if he doesn’t yet know what that purpose is. It isn’t for presenting himself at parties he wasn’t invited to, in any case.
“You are very bad at being fun,” Portia tells him firmly, and Cinna doesn’t even think about it when he bends his head and slides their mouths together, there in the glittering light, surrounded by strangers.
“That was cheating,” Portia tells him when they finally pull apart. Her voice is soft, sad, but her smile is real enough; he hasn’t even damaged her make-up.
Sometimes, Cinna misses her, misses her even when he’s holding her in his arms like this.
“You never specified parameters,” he replies, just to make her laugh.
The final of the seventy-second Hunger Games falls on a Thursday afternoon. It’s been a swift games; brutal, bloody and harsh, with the career tributes ripping apart the tributes the wild animals in the sweating artificial rainforest haven’t already eaten.
Cinna is finishing his final assessment piece, sitting on the floor of the studio with Portia as a reluctant model, making huffing noises occasionally when he won’t let her sit down. The Games are playing on the wall, projected onto the blank space, but neither of them are paying much attention; he’s more focused on the intricate beadwork around the hem, bruise purple and shining.
Portia hisses between her teeth and Cinna hears the commentators groan in something like sympathy, schadenfreude. A canon sounds, and he threads another bead onto his needle. There are machines to do this, of course, but he wants to get this exactly right.
Rain begins onscreen, and Portia shifts a little, hands clenching in the full skirts of the gown for a moment.
“Just both tributes from One, the girl from Two, the boy from Nine and that girl from Ten who hasn’t stopped running,” she tells Cinna.
That means it was Eight that just died, and he takes a silent breath for another member of his old district, gone.
“Will you ever tell me what your district is?” he asks her.
He hears the wet ripping of flesh from the Games, refuses to look up as his hands tremble.
“I don’t have a district anymore,” she replies quietly, a more direct reply than he’s ever gotten before. He gets the feeling he’ll never get anything more out of her; maybe this is enough.
“Does that make this hurt less?” he asks, another canon sounding, a child screaming like a raging animal.
Portia sighs. “What do you think?”
While students drunkenly roam the halls, partaking in a dozen impromptu Hunger Games launch parties, taking bets on the ten children left alive after the cornucopia’s bloodbath, Cinna goes to find Portia.
She’s hiding in the closets full of stock, of course, lying splayed across piles of silks and velvets and brocades, ribbons and lace trickling between her fingers.
“It turns out the arena gets very cold at night,” Cinna tells her, closing the door behind him.
“And everything’s too damp to light a fire?” Portia guesses.
“And there are things in the darkness,” Cinna adds.
“I’d expect nothing less.” Portia’s still looking at the fabric threaded between her fingers.
Cinna comes to lie down beside her, plucking a string of lace from her hands.
“Is that from Eight?” she asks after a long moment.
He wraps the ribbon around his wrists, his fingers, his palms. “Handmade,” he confirms at last.
Most of the material is made in factories nowadays, where accidents happen - last year burns suddenly in his mouth like bile, memories he refuses to hold anymore, accidents happen, yes, when they are engineered - but the finest things are still crafted using skills centuries old. Cinna won’t think about most of his childhood, but he remembers the old ladies making lace in the afternoon, thick bent fingers worn thin.
Portia reaches to take his hand, her own fingers still tangled with silk ribbons in skeins of red, gold, purple, silver, white. Cinna lets her, even as they navigate what is left of their intimacy, because the little girl from Eight went down choking on her own blood this morning, dark eyes glassy in the sunlight.
His sister was spared the reaping, at least, he thinks dully.
The suit Portia is drawing is the ripe green of a new apple, the inner layers coloured white like the vulnerable flesh when you dig in a knife and wrench free a piece.
They’re in one of the Capitol’s municipal parks; a laughable excuse for greenery, but if you want to see a real, honest tree then there’s nowhere else to go. Cinna draws shoes that look like bark, hiding secrets in their crevices. Portia is barefoot, toenails painted diamond white.
“Was this ever a good idea?” she asks, hooking a finger in his sunglasses to drag them down his nose, something sad in her eyes.
Yes, he wants to say. No, he thinks. His pen hovers over the page, undecided, and Portia’s eyes skitter over his expression, reading too much into it, reading too little.
It’s been a long, long year. Cinna tries to figure out the last time he slept, truly slept, when he dreamed of anything other than blood and fire and empty spaces.
“If you leave me now-” he begins, trying for joking. She’s his only real friend in the Capitol; the only person he can stand to talk to who hasn’t slaughtered their way to victory in a Hunger Games, and that probably says too much about him.
“I’ll never leave you.” Portia pushes his sunglasses back into place for him, turns back to the suit she’s colouring in. She sounds so matter-of-fact, and Cinna’s heard that promise before.
This changes everything and nothing, and after a moment he rearranges his world view a little and lies back into the grass, tipping his face away from the sunshine.
“You know Finnick Odair?” Shimmer demands.
Cinna internally rolls his eyes at his roommate, but outwardly nods; he likes Shimmer, vapid and unimaginative as he is, and he could be living with someone far worse, after all.
“He knows Johanna Mason too,” Portia puts in from where she’s sitting at the desk, a dress she’s re-hemming frothing out of her lap. Her voice sounds innocent enough, but he can hear the laughter she’s barely keeping out of the sound. Johanna isn’t someone you boast about knowing, after all, and Shimmer goes a little pale under the lilac swirls of his facial tattoos.
He seems to decide to ignore what she’s said for the sake of the conversation; he shakes his head slightly and says: “you could end up dressing victors when you leave here, imagine.”
Cinna isn’t here for glory, but he doesn’t think that Shimmer would understand being told that, so he just laughs.
“I will never dress victors,” he replies easily, lying back on his bed, while sequins and lace tumble out of Portia’s lap.
“You,” Finnick says, a slur in his voice, “are going to get a reputation.”
Portia looks at Cinna, a smile toying around her painted lips. “Which one of us are you talking about?” she asks.
Finnick waves a hand, narrowly avoiding covering them in the sticky orange alcohol he’s drinking. “Maybe I’m talking about both of you.”
“You let him get drunk?” Johanna demands, dropping into the seat beside Finnick, all knees and elbows and spiky hair, poured into a silver dress she clearly didn’t choose herself.
“You can’t contain me, darling,” Finnick informs her, baring his teeth in a snarling grin.
Cinna doesn’t understand the relationship between them, the friendship if you can call it that. But there’s a lot of things about being a champion of the Hunger Games that he doesn’t understand, could never understand, and maybe that’s why he and Portia are the only Academy students who sneak out and go to these parties with the battered broken victors of the Games.
“I’m not getting into this with you,” Johanna says swiftly, reaching for what remains of Finnick’s drink and draining it herself. “I’m only sitting here to make Cashmere and Gloss leave me the fuck alone.”
Cinna puts an absent arm around Portia’s shoulders; she leans automatically into his touch. They all have more in common than it’s comfortable to admit, but there’s still a brittle divide between the two of them and the two victors sitting opposite, eyes too bright from whatever it is you can buy to make the world bearable.
And they all know what the cost of believing in more is, what the Capitol will take from you if you don’t do as you’re told.
Portia shifts a little against him, as though she can hear his thoughts, though the music is loud and the lights are bright and the place is packed with people tossing around the phrase slumming it. Titillating themselves on some kind of imagined danger, as though the victors are wild animals who might at any moment bite.
Finnick is leaning into Johanna, a muscle in his jaw jumping as he whispers hard and fast into her ear, and Cinna reflects that, well, in a way they really are.
Portia laughs at him when he leans over her, tugging the sheet she’s using to cover herself into a more flattering position, draping across her breasts and baring her thigh.
“Are you using our sex life to work on your homework project?” she asks mildly, eyes glittering in the dark.
“Maybe,” he replies, dropping a kiss to her cheek and lying down beside her again, the two of them wrapped in soft pale hints of light from the wall of Portia’s room, which has artificial stars twinkling across it.
“Good to know,” she says dryly, but he can see her smile, and he teasingly pushes her shoulder.
He loves these moments of quiet that they steal, that still exist despite everything else. There are days when Portia feels like the only good thing left in his life, Portia and the material that he can fashion into something new and perfect and beautiful, better than reality. Reality is hard and bitter and it’s easy to understand why so many people in the Capitol turn blind eyes to the world, focused on parties and appearances. Sometimes, Cinna wishes he could.
“I wish...” Portia sighs and trails off, fingers skimming through the sheets and ruining his work.
“I know,” he says, because he does, because he doesn’t want to make her have to say it.
“No,” she corrects him, “you don’t. But it’s okay.”
She curls onto her side and he follows suit, wrapping himself around her the way he always does, and concentrates on Portia because it’s easier than any of the other things he could think about.
Foil, a man in the year above them, had invitations to a party that most of the students backed away from when they saw them, but Cinna was feeling just self-destructive enough to accept. Students have historically been rebels, but no longer: the Academy teaches them how to toe the line and pretend that that was what they always wanted as much as it teaches them how a string of pearls can alter an outfit for the better.
It’s too late now, though; the damage is done, and there’s nothing that they can take from him anymore.
“You don’t have to come,” he tells Portia, while she laces her shoes up her calves. “I don’t want-”
“You’re not the only one with nothing left to lose,” she reminds him sharply, before she softens it with a smile. “Besides, this is a new dress.”
“It looks lovely,” he tells her, because it does.
Later, an arm drops around his shoulders. “So, I heard a story about a young and promising designer who got his family killed by asking a lot of questions.”
Cinna’s throat hurts, and he immediately wants to attack whoever is speaking. Except that when he turns his head, he recognises him.
“You’re Finnick Odair,” he says blankly.
“Points for observation for the boy wonder,” Finnick responds, rolling his eyes.
“You’re the same age as me,” Cinna can’t help reminding Finnick, looking around for Portia, who seems to have disappeared into the crowd.
Finnick laughs; a sleek, practiced one that he buries in Cinna’s shoulder. Across the room, Cinna can see an annoyed-looking older man watching the two of them, and remembers that badly-kept secret about victors and what you can hire them to do for you.
“Should you be talking to me?” he asks.
“Probably not,” Finnick replies. “But I wanted to meet you. And to tell you that I’m sorry. I sound like I don’t mean it, but I do.”
There’s sadness in those gold-flecked eyes, now that Cinna can see them up close in real life. He remembers the blood-covered boy in the arena, remembers watching it at home, his sister hiding her face in his mother’s shoulder.
No. No, he doesn’t remember that.
“Thank you,” he replies, a little startled by this entire situation.
Finnick flickers him a swift smile that’s nearly real, and says: “you’d better go rescue your girlfriend from Johanna. She’s a little... well, she’s a lot too much.”
“Johanna Mason?” Cinna asks. This night has taken a turn for the incredibly surreal.
“You know any other Johannas capable of getting into these parties?” Finnick asks. “Because it isn’t her sparkling personality that gets her invited, believe me.”
He pulls away from Cinna, turning back halfway across the room to tip him a cocky little salute, and Cinna thinks: oh. Okay then.
He thinks: well then, none of this is over.
Mostly, Cinna pours himself into his work over the next few months. He draws, and he sketches, and he sews, and he convinces his classmates to act as models for him as he experiments and refines and perfects. He sets one of the classrooms on fire trying to simulate flames across the bodice of a new gown and half expects a bitterly fresh new punishment as a response to what looks like an act of defiance, but the cameras discovered it was an accident and he gets away without even a stern talking to.
He eats when Portia brings him food and sleeps when she appears to drag him to bed, and talks when she presses him to. The weight of knowledge and of guilt and of blame resting across his back is so heavy it’s a wonder he can stand, some days, and it tends to be then that he finds himself with his face buried in Portia’s shoulder, finding breathing impossible.
Sometimes, Cinna wonders what it would take to get her to leave him before she’s taken, but she seems to be able to tell whenever he thinks that because that’s when she kisses him, hard and loud enough to drown out the voices in his head, the shuddering in his limbs.
“You should call your family,” he says one night, three a.m. and drunk on penance, “call them and tell them that you love them.”
Portia strokes his hair, his back, his cheek. “My family are gone,” she tells him. He frowns, but she shakes her head. “One day that’s all you’ll say too. My family are gone. There’s no sense in reopening old wounds.”
Cinna nods, forcing himself to swallow the tears that want to spill, because he doesn’t want to cry anymore, won’t give the Capitol that satisfaction. He wonders what Portia did that was so bad she needed teaching a lesson. He knows that he’ll never ask.
He works, feverishly, blindly, for three days straight, locked in the studio while people bang on the door and shout, words that all blur into one after a while.
When he completes the dress, it’s perfect; simply but devastatingly cut, the shimmering, shifting fabric the exact colour of his sister’s eyes.
They know if you don’t watch the Games, if the viewing screen in your room isn’t tuned in, so the news arrives when Cinna and Portia are watching the final of the seventy-first Hunger Games; a skinny frightened girl from Eleven armed with sharpened sticks attempting to escape a boy from Two twice the size of her armed with a dripping machete.
Cinna isn’t sure who he’s expecting when he hears the knock at the door, but he certainly isn’t expecting Professor Apple, principal of the Academy and someone he’s previously only seen during beginning and end of semester meetings.
The look on Apple’s face makes his stomach clench, and Portia mutes the television somewhere behind him.
“If you accompany me to my office-” he begins.
Cinna shakes his head, panic uncurling through his limbs. “I’d rather know now, thank you, sir.”
He closes the door to his room behind him, leaving them alone in the quiet narrow corridor, painted an ugly shade of green that doesn’t help anything.
Apple’s face is creased with regret, his lips pressed too-tight together. After a moment, he says: “there was an accident at one of the factories in District Eight.”
Accident, Cinna thinks, but he doesn’t believe it. He can see that Professor Apple wants to believe it, and that is perhaps worse.
“I see,” he says softly, voice cracking. “And my family?”
Apple fails here, ducking his head, forcing a rough swallow. He can’t meet Cinna’s gaze as he says: “your grandmother and mother were killed instantly. Your sister is in the hospital, though she isn’t- she isn’t expected to survive the night.”
Cinna nods, unable to speak, unable to move. “Thank you for telling me,” he says.
“If you would like-” Apple begins uncomfortably.
“No,” Cinna interrupts. “No.”
He fumbles behind him, almost falls backwards into his room. Portia is sitting silently, watching him, and he doesn’t know what to say, how to explain.
“We should finish, um, finish watching that,” he says, gesturing at the screen. He turns the sound back on the television just in time to hear the final scream of the little girl from Eleven as the machete is buried in her chest.
He stumbles to his bathroom, falling to his knees as bile rises in his throat.
The scream echoes from the television again, while Portia comes to sit on the floor beside him. She doesn’t say a word.
The essay is a triumph, if ‘triumph’ can be measured by how many badly-disguised Peacekeepers begin to follow him around, guns ostentatious.
“You should be more careful,” Portia tells him in bed one night, curls rippling across the pillow. “Really, Cinna, you should have just written about how much you like velvet or something equally non-problematic.”
“It’s an essay,” he tells her, curling arms around her waist. “It’ll be fine. Really.”
Only something he submitted to cover a semester’s work ends up being leaked from the Academy, and once it hits the public information systems, well, there’s not a lot Cinna can do to get it back.
They were supposed to be talking about how the vibrancy of the Capitol can be reflected in the clothes of its citizens, but Cinna found himself writing about how the other districts find themselves scrambling to acquire the most basic amenities of clothing, and surely it would be better to share the flavour around with everyone, the better to have a united Panem.
It is slowly becoming apparent that he might have said a little too much.
Portia keeps watching him as though she’s expecting something, though she denies it whenever she asks.
“You should be more careful,” she admits when pressed. “You can never tell who you’ll get hurt.”
Cinna doesn’t really believe her, of course.
The last afternoon of his life that makes any sense at all, Cinna spends with Portia. She’s been his girlfriend for a year, and sometimes he looks at her and wonders how he got so lucky, how stumbling over a girl in his first week at the Academy has lead to this, to someone who seems to understand him better than he understands himself.
They picnic on the roof of the Academy, sitting on a wide knitted blanket that Portia made herself for a project last year, sharing slices of crisp fresh apple.
“Promise me,” Portia murmurs into a kiss, Cinna’s fingers threaded through her hair.
“Anything,” he replies, because he isn’t that scared young man from District Eight who stumbled from a train with raw blistered fingers and a bag full of needles, and Portia’s the only person who knew him then and knows him know and hasn’t blamed him for any of it.
She smiles; half real, half sad. “Promise me life will always feel this good,” she says, waving a hand at the clear blue sky, the soft purple blanket, the apples and wine and the golden afternoon.
Portia isn’t stupid or naive and they both know that he can’t, but he smiles at her anyway and murmurs: “I promise.”
It’s one of those things that lovers say; he doesn’t know then just how much it will come back to haunt him.